


Legacy

by gala_apples



Category: Bandom, Cobra Starship, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: M/M, Mental Health Issues, Minor Character Death, Rape Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-27
Updated: 2013-03-27
Packaged: 2017-12-06 17:30:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/738255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gala_apples/pseuds/gala_apples
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day Ryan's dad dies is the day he starts seeing weird things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Legacy

Ryan’s awake for two days after he goes home. He can’t tell if he wants to be or not, can’t remember from one moment to the next if the water he boiled was for tea to soothe him or coffee to stimulate him, can’t remember if the tv is on to lull him to sleep with background sound, or keep him blinking at the fast moving pictures. He doesn’t leave the house, and he doesn’t accept visitors. He does bad enough on the phone, repeating himself, laughing at sentences that aren’t jokes. Face to face would just add another dimension of crazy. 

Eventually though, he needs to leave. Not everything can be done by his father’s friends from the legion. At the very least, Ryan needs to look appropriate at the funeral. He’s used to stage-presentable, and interview-presentable, not formal event-presentable.

He walks to a formal wear rental store for the suit he’ll need to wear. It doesn’t occur to him to call a cab until he’s already on the sidewalk, and then it somehow seems like too much to go back.

One moment everything is normal. As normal as things can be when your father is suddenly dead, at least. The next moment the shop owner’s face contorts and he looks like a parrot. Ryan’s seen parrots before. The mall he and Spencer used to trawl when they were bored but needed air conditioning too badly to skateboard had a pet store with a parrot in the window. They passed that thing hundreds if not a thousand times when he was a teenager. He knows what a parrot looks like, and the man behind the counter has a fucking parrot face. Ryan freezes and covers his eyes with his hands. He just needs a second, and things will make sense again. When the shop owner yells at him that he doesn’t serve Grimms Ryan drops his hands. The owner still looks like a human-parrot hybrid. Ryan runs out of the store. He can bury his father in black jeans and a dress shirt. Or he can go shop once he’s gotten some sleep. The insomnia is making him hallucinate.

It’s an excuse that can only last so long. Its better cousin is grief is making him hallucinate. Never mind that most of the love was lost somewhere between the first and fiftieth bruise, it must be grieving. It’s grieving when one of the caterers is a frog, and it’s grieving when half the men in dress uniform are eagles, and it’s grieving when he’s on the plane back to his band and he passes a mother and father and child that look like beavers.

Eventually he just has to admit it. He’s insane. It’s okay though. Other people have been insane but musically sound. Kurt Cobain, for example. Pete. Mikey Way from My Chem just released a statement. He won’t let it affect the band.

Ryan manages to keep his shit together for two years. Two full years of seeing people’s faces distort on occasion, and he’s gotten used to walking past them and not looking back. And then Panic goes on a five date Australian tour with TAI and Cobra Starship, and it’s too close, and completely unavoidable. 

Alex and Ryland are both snakes. They’ve got grey-yellow scales. They’ve got fangs. They’ve got slitted eyes. 

But it’s okay. As long as he doesn’t _tell_ them they’re snakes, everything will be okay. He can’t get locked up and ruin the band as long as no one thinks he’s insane. As long as he just stays quiet, no one will think he’s crazy, and the band won’t go on hiatus while he’s committed.

They’ve just gotten to the building for the second show when one of the venue’s staff sees him. She changes, and attacks. It’s the first time a hallucination has come at him, and Ryan deals with it the same way he deals with every other time. He closes his eyes and waits for it to go away.

When he opens his eyes, Alex and Ryland are standing over her. She’s splayed out on the floor. She’s not dead, she’s breathing, but she looks extremely worse for the wear. Both of her arms are broken, and from the way she’s wincing each breath Ryan would make an educated guess and say her ribs are cracked.

“What the hell Ross?”

“We know you’re on the down low, but you can’t just let a Hexenbiest come at you. It’s not like they’re Mausehertz.”

“Yeah,” Alex scoffs. “Like a Mausehertz would ever come at anyone.”

“But still. What the hell?”

“Did you just...did you just attack the bartender?”

“Yeah, the Hexenbiest that was coming at you. You want us to help you carry her to your bus, so you can do your Grimmly duties?”

Oh man. It’s worse than he thought. He’s getting really crazy now. He should have expected it, all mental disorders progress if they’re not treated. Now his brain is making up things that don’t even make sense to him. He’s brought it upon himself, Ryan knows, but it’s still upsetting.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next.”

“What do Grimms do?”

“I don’t even know what a Grimm is. I mean, a reaper with a scythe? Or-”

“Are you serious? Don’t you have any lore?”

Ryan has books, a lot of them. He’s far from illiterate. But he doubts he has any lore. Folk stories aren’t really his thing; Brendon was the one that wanted the folk angle to some of the lyrics.

“We can do you a basic history lesson, but for any details you’re going to have to talk to another Grimm.”

“How about you start off with that word?”

“Grimm? Okay, so you’re a Grimm. Picture an extended family of Sam and Deans. Basically way back in the day the Grimm family had a shit ton of kids. Their job was to catch the Wesen, and-”

“Kill them all horribly dead.”

“Yeah. That.”

“You can see where we’d develop coping mechanisms like attack before attacked. Besides, some of us are kind of just assholes. The Klaustreich suck.”

“Yeah, and the Schakalen aren’t that great either.”

“We’re Lausenschlangen. In general our kind isn’t that bad. A few family lines like to eat people, but most of us don’t.”

“That’s...good?” Ryan isn’t sure what’s the proper response to ‘my friends eat humans, but I don’t.’

“You’re supposed to tell the next in line what their duties are going to be. Like a Watcher on Buffy. I guess your dad didn’t.”

“He had other concerns.” No need to elaborate, everyone’s heard Camisado at this point.

“I guess the upside of not knowing you had a duty to fill is at least it didn’t change your life any.”

Ryan laughs. “You know I haven’t had sex in two years?”

“Excuse me?”

“I was afraid the guy would switch halfway through. No one wants a screaming fit in the middle of a fuck.”

“Why didn’t you just fuck Wesen? Someone already switched? At least then they couldn’t switch halfway, if you were already seeing them.”

“Yeah, fucking the guy that looked like a rhino was really hot prospect.”

“Oh come on. We’re not too bad.” Alex switches, with all the ease of blinking, and Ryan has to admit he’s right. Maybe. Whatever, snakes are totally sexy. Ask Britney Spears. Fuck, ask Gabe.

“So now that you know, are you going to start hunting? We know you see them, you flinch every time you look at us.”

Ryan doesn’t know how to respond. They take his silence for indecisiveness. They crowd either side of him and for a minute he thinks they’re about to pull a boa constrictor and crush him. Instead their lips are on his neck. Ryan likes it, whether or not this is a giant hallucination. But if somehow it is real, it’s not fair. Sex for your life is the worst kind of coercion.

“What are you doing?” He asks weakly. A better person would tell them to stop, but Ryan knows his flaws too well to consider himself a good person.

“Smelling pheromones. The snake would say no. Wrong gender, wrong species. Luckily our human side comes out to play too.”

“You can pretend to resist if you want to. If it makes you feel better about wanting this. The receiver snake is always reluctant.” Alex smirks. It’s a somewhat menacing look when you consider the fangs. “usually there’s biting and holding down involved.”

Ryan can’t help his quiver.

“See, the sexy thing is we can smell what your body just did there. So we know you want it. So just a matter of how you’re going to play this.”

Ryan says no and starts to walk away. At the same time he concentrates as hard as he can on one of them fucking him while the other holds him down. If they really can smell arousal, they should know what he means.

He gets as far as the smoking alley before they join him. Alex pulls him down to the ground, and pins his hands to the dirty cement. If Ryan looked up he’d be eye to eye with him, but he can’t. Ryland is behind him, tugging his pants down the curve of his ass until they’re at the barrier of his knees pressed into the ground. 

Ryland doesn’t waste any time. Instead of touching him as a matter of foreplay he puts a hand on either of his cheeks and separates them. Ryan hopes with all his might that they aren’t more aware of certain smells with their sensitive pheromone sniffing snake noses. _You smell like shit_ is just about the worst dismissal he can think of.

Ryland never pulls his own jeans down. Nor does he touch Ryan’s cock. He just keeps his clever tongue inhumanly deep in Ryan’s ass until he’s bucking from Ryland’s mouth. Alex isn’t letting him move far though. Ryland’s hand is there to catch his come. As Ryan struggles to get his pants rebuttoned when his limbs still feel like noodles, Ryland offers his hand to Alex, who licks it clean. Ryan’s not sure if it’s a kink thing or a snake thing, but either way it’s hardly weirder than his rape fantasy and fucking snake hybrids, so he’s not about to comment.

“Once we get back to the states we’ll take a road trip to Oregon. There’s a Grimm there that only kills about half the Wesen he comes in contact with. The ratio’s not as good as yours, of course, but from what we’ve heard, he mostly kills the nasty ones. Lowen, Klaustreich. You know.” 

Alex talks like Ryan should understand the foreign language. And from what he’s learned, he _should_ understand it. That he doesn’t is just another thing to blame on his father. Ryan’s not sure he’ll ever get over it.


End file.
